I have quite a long history with Shortcuts. Back to do the days of Workflow, I have been off and on with shortcuts. I have written a number of fairly complex shortcuts, a couple that heavily get used everyday.
However, more and more I face complete instability with shortcuts, from small things like mass duplication of shortcuts (which I can deal with), to outright failure of shortcuts to work at all…From what I can tell, I’m not the only one, but is my case extreme and does anyone have any suggestions?
So a little more context, my two more major issues are as follows:
There are times, where for some unknown reason, shortcuts just fail to execute any shortcut, you will start a shortcut and it will just hang, and if left, it would sit there for hours. On my iPhone 14 the progress bar will sit there in the Dynamic Island. I can stop the shortcut, run a different shortcut, quit and restart the app and they will all just hang. The only way to sort is to reboot the phone and then shortcuts will happily will happily run for a couple of days to a week and then for no obvious reason, it just hangs again.
For some of my more complex and longer shortcuts (sometime they reach out to other shortcuts as functions etc) they will just break, again for no obvious reason. I could have developed the shortcut spending hours building and testing and then using it for a while with no issue and all of a sudden I get “There was a problem running this shortcut” and nothing else. If I attempt to edit the shortcut, the app crashes. If I duplicate the shortcut, the duplicate also crashes the app (sometime even duplicating will cause a crash). If I share, it crashes. If I import from a backup, the imported shortcut crashes. Note, I can edit the shortcut on my Mac but it uses actions not supported on the Mac so can’t run it.
So, what have I done? I recently tried removing the shortcuts app from all devices, disabling shortcuts syncing in iCloud and deleting all the iCloud data and reimport shortcuts from a backup. That seemed to work ok for a little while but the issues came back.
Does anyone have any other suggestions before I wipe my phone completely? I am running iOS 17.6, no Betas anywhere. These problems have plagued me intermittently for well over a year so would be very happy if anyone has any suggestions.
Right now, I’ve completely fallen out of love with Shortcuts which makes me sad.
Are you alone in many of your thoughts and experiences? I should say not. Certainly I have expressed similar dismay with Shortcuts over the past few years, but I think overall it has been improving and I’m hoping the recent focus on intents over at Apple might have helped steady the rocking of HMS Shortcuts.
Are there any magical fixes? If there were, then everyone would know about them.
Does a reboot often fix weirdness? Yes, and this is often the quickest and best solution for weirdness with Shortcuts, but it is not a guaranteed fix for all failures.
Does iCloud sync for Shortcuts behave oddly at times. Yes.
Do Shortcuts get corrupted where you can only seem to edit them on one device. Yes - and sometimes things like taking them in and out of the Shortcuts format can help reset things, or even up and down to cloud sharing. Sometimes things too reset themselves.
Should you be reporting these occurrences through Apple’s Feedback Assistant? Yes … though right now I suspect they will be focused on a newer OS, so …
Is it worth seeing what the new release of OS’s brings with their release? Well, maybe review at 18.1, but start reporting issues when you find any in 18. 18 will hopefully improve things from 17.x, but you never know for sure until it lands.
So I originally posted this message over a month ago, it took a while to get approved so a decent amount of time has passed.
In the end I bit the bullet and upgraded to iOS 18 public beta and I’m happy to report all my issues regarding the stability and corruption are gone which is a major success. Long may it last.
However, the story is not all rosy. Through my various testing and trouble shooting I decided to backup all my shortcuts as files, and then went in to iCloud Storage settings and selected “Delete Data from iCloud”. I then renabled Shortcuts syncing and imported the Shortcuts I needed but now everytime I launch Shortcuts i’m presented with:
“iCloud Shortcuts Deleted - You have recently deleted your shortcuts data from iCloud. Would you like to continue sycing shortcuts to iCloud?”
“Continue Syncing” or “Cancel”
No matter what I choose, I just end up in a loop with nothing syncing so unable to use shortcuts on my mac.
If you have any advice on this, that would be appreciated. I tried apple support with no luck.
I have roughly similar experiences, although not exactly the same. I do not write long shortcuts, because of how fragile the editing and execution environments are. In many cases, you can use small shortcuts for the unique functionality you need to get data into/out of an app, and then work with that data in a conventional programming language or another automation tool. I read today the author of Keyboard Maestro, for example, estimates it has “about 1 crash per 50 user-years,” so while it isn’t a perfect app in all regards, it aims to be (and has proven to me to be) generally more robust than Shortcuts. If you layer in other tools like Hazel, Alfred workflows, Python/Ruby, CLI programs, etc., I find you can get what you want done without being hamstrung by Shortcuts’ shortcomings.